Bing was unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009, at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego, California, for release on June 1, 2009.[4] Notable changes include the listing of search suggestions while queries are entered and a list of related searches (called "Explore pane") based on[5]semantic technology from Powerset, which Microsoft purchased in 2008.[6]

On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search.[7] All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners were expected to have made the transition by early 2012.[8]

In October 2011, Microsoft stated that they were working on new back-end search infrastructure with the goal of delivering faster and slightly more relevant search results for users. Known as "Tiger", the new index-serving technology has been incorporated into Bing globally since August 2011.[9] In May 2012, Microsoft announced another redesign of its search engine that includes "Sidebar", a social feature that searches users' social networks for information relevant to the search query.[10] In September 2013, a new-look Bing was released to tie in with Microsoft's "Metro"design language.

History

MSN Search

MSN Search homepage in 2006

Windows Live Search homepage

Live Search homepage, which would help to create the Bing homepage later on.

MSN Search was a search engine by Microsoft that consisted of a search engine, index, and web crawler. MSN Search first launched in the third quarter of 1998 and used search results from Inktomi. In early 1999, MSN Search launched a version which displayed listings from Looksmart blended with results from Inktomi except for a short time in 1999 when results from AltaVista were used instead. Since then Microsoft upgraded MSN Search to provide its own self-built search engine results, the index of which was updated weekly and sometimes daily. The upgrade started as a beta program in November 2004, and came out of beta in February 2005. Image search was powered by a third party, Picsearch. The service also started providing its search results to other search engine portals in an effort to better compete in the market.

Windows Live Search

The first public beta of Windows Live Search was unveiled on March 8, 2006, with the final release on September 11, 2006 replacing MSN Search. The new search engine used search tabs that include Web, news, images, music, desktop, local, and Microsoft Encarta.

In the roll-over from MSN Search to Windows Live Search, Microsoft stopped using Picsearch as their image search provider and started performing their own image search, fueled by their own internal image search algorithms.[11]

Live Search

On March 21, 2007, Microsoft announced that it would separate its search developments from the Windows Live services family, rebranding the service as Live Search. Live Search was integrated into the Live Search and Ad Platform headed by Satya Nadella, part of Microsoft's Platform and Systems division. As part of this change, Live Search was merged with Microsoft adCenter.[12]

A series of reorganisations and consolidations of Microsoft's search offerings were made under the Live Search branding. On May 23, 2008, Microsoft announced the discontinuation of Live Search Books and Live Search Academic and integrated all academic and book search results into regular search, and as a result this also included the closure of Live Search Books Publisher Program. Soon after, Windows Live Expo was discontinued on July 31, 2008. Live Search Macros, a service for users to create their own custom search engines or use macros created by other users, was also discontinued shortly after. On May 15, 2009, Live Product Upload, a service which allowed merchants to upload products information onto Live Search Products, was discontinued. The final reorganisation came as Live Search QnA was rebranded as MSN QnA on February 18, 2009, however, it was subsequently discontinued on May 21, 2009.[13]

Microsoft recognised that there would be a brand issue as long as the word "Live" remained in the name.[14] As an effort to create a new identity for Microsoft's search services, Live Search was officially replaced by Bing on June 3, 2009.[15]

Yahoo! search deal

On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced that they had made a ten-year deal in which the Yahoo! search engine would be replaced by Bing. Yahoo! will get to keep 88% of the revenue from all search ad sales on its site for the first five years of the deal, and have the right to sell advertising on some Microsoft sites. Yahoo! Search will still maintain its own user interface, but will eventually feature "Powered by Bing™" branding.[16][17] All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners are expected to be transitioned by early 2012.[8]

Market share

Previous Bing logo used until September 2013

Before the launch of Bing, the marketshare of Microsoft web search pages (MSN and Live search) had been small. By January 2011, Experian Hitwise show that Bing's market share had increased to 12.8% at the expense of Yahoo! and Google. Bing powered searches also continued to have a higher "success rate" compared to Google, with more users clicking on the resulting links.[18] In the same period, comScore’s "2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review" report showed that "Bing was the big gainer in year-over-year search activity, picking up 29% more searches in 2010 than it did in 2009".[19] The Wall Street Journal notes the 1% jump in share "appeared to come at the expense of rival Google Inc".[20] In February 2011, Bing beat Yahoo! for the first time with 4.37% search share while Yahoo! received 3.93%.[21]

Counting core searches only, i.e., those where the user has an intent to interact with the search result, Bing had a market share of 14.54% in the second quarter of 2011 in the United States.[22][23][24][25]

The combined "Bing Powered" U.S. searches have declined from 26.5% in 2011 to 25.9% in April 2012.[26]

Three-column display

On May 10, 2012, Bing announced a future format change to a three-column display. The first column shows the traditional search results. The middle column, called "Snapshot", shows Bing's structured data and allows performing actions such as making purchases or getting directions. The third column, or "Sidebar", provides data from Facebook and Twitter.[24]

Features

Interface features

Daily changing of background image. The images are mostly of noteworthy places in the world, though it sometimes displays animals, people, and sports. The background image also contains information about the element(s) shown in the image

Video homepage for HTML5 enabled browsers on occasional events, similar to the daily background images

Images page shows the main picture from that day and four searches that refers to that image with three preview pictures per search term

Left side navigation pane. Includes navigation and, on results pages, related searches and prior searches

Right side extended preview which shows a bigger view of the page and gives URLs to links inside of the page

Sublinks – On certain search results, the search result page also shows section links within the article (this is also done on other search engines, including Google)

Enhanced view where third party site information can be viewed inside Bing

On certain sites, search from within the website on the results page

On certain sites, Bing will display the Customer Service number on the results page

Media features

Video thumbnail Preview – where, by hovering over a video thumbnail, the video automatically starts playing

Advanced filters or advanced (query) operators – allow users to refine search results based on properties such as image size, aspect ratio, color or black and white, photo or illustration, and facial features recognition

Instant answers

Sports – Bing can directly display scores from a specific day, recent scores from a league or scores and statistics on teams or players.

Finance – When entering a company name or stock symboland either stock or quote in the search box Bing will show direct stock information like a stockchart, price, volume, and p/e ratio[28] in a webslice that users can subscribe to.

Conversion of units (e.g., 1 oz in tbs, 1 cup in oz)

Mathematical calculations – (e.g., 2 * pi * 24).[29] Users can enter mathematical expressions in the search box using a variety of operators and trigonometric functions[30] and Bing will provide a direct calculation of the expression.

Advanced computations – Using the Wolfram Alpha computational engine, Bing can also give results to advanced mathemathical problems (e.g. "lim x/2x as x->2") and other Wolfram Alpha-related queries (e.g., asking the number of calories in a typical pizza).

Package tracking and tracing – When a user types the name of the shipping company and the tracking number, Bing will provide direct tracking information

Dictionary – When "define", "definition", or "what is" followed by a word is entered in the searchbox Bing will show a direct answer from the Encarta dictionary

Translate – Auto translation of certain search phrases, often with phrases including "translate" or "in English". For example, to translate me llamo from Spanish to English the user would simply type "translate me llamo in English" and he or she would be redirected to a search results page with Bing Translator with the translation from Spanish to English[disputed– discuss]

Local info

Current traffic information

Business listing

People listing

Collections

Localized searching for restaurants and services

Localized searching for coupons and deals

Restaurant reviews

Movies played in an area – When a current movie title is entered in the search box Bing will provide listings of local theaters showing the movie. When a city is added to the search box, Bing provides the movie listings localized for that city.

City hotel listings – When "hotels" and a city name is entered in the search box Bing can provide hotel listings with a map. The listing leads to a detail search page with the hotels listed that holds extended information on the hotels and contains links to reviews, directions reservations and bird-eye view of the hotel. On the page with the listings the list can be refined by settings on ratings, pricing, amenities, payment, and parking

Integration with Facebook

Users have the option to send messages to their friends in the search results

As part of the changes announced May 10, 2012, the "sidebar" column of the new three-column search results display will include recommendations from Facebook and the ability to interact with others from the same page. For the previous year, search results had included Facebook recommendations using the "like" button, but most users did not want this; the new display makes this feature separate from search results in general[24]

Integration with Apple

Apple's search results have now been integrated with Bing's web search engine.

On June 10, 2013, Apple announced that it will be dropping Google as its web search engine and include Microsoft's Bing.[32]

This feature is only integrated with iOS 7 and higher and for users with an iPhone 4S or higher as the feature is only integrated with Siri, Apple's personal assistant.

Integration with Windows 8

The Bing integration captures a variety of features, one of the most prominent and advertised: Hero Search. This feature allows users to browse for popular and well-known places, objects or people. Searching France, for example, will show popular search items, such as population, calling code and date founded. The current weather and location are also directly accessible using Bing Weather and Bing maps. The "Hero" result will go further to provide attractions using Bing Images and popular websites relating to France, such as France Wikipedia and France's official website. Searching an artist will display similar results with the option to play music using the Windows 8 integrated Xbox Music application.

International

Bing is available in many languages and has been localized for many countries.[34]

Bing Dictionary enables users to quickly search for definitions of English words. Bing Dictionary results are based on Microsoft Encarta World English Dictionary.[citation needed] In addition, Bing Dictionary also provides an audio player for users to hear the pronunciation of the dictionary words.

Bing Entertainment allow users to view and search for detailed information and reviews for music, movies, television shows, and video games. Bing Entertainment partners with Microsoft Games to allow users to directly play online games within Bing Online Games.

Events

Bing Events allow users to search for upcoming events from Zvents, and displays the date and time, venue details, brief description, as well as method to purchase tickets for the events listed. Users can also filter the search results by date and categories.

Finance

Bing Finance enables users to search for exchange listed stocks and displays the relevant stock information, company profile and statistics, financial statements, stock ratings, analyst recommendations, as well as news related to the particular stock or company. Bing Finance also allow users to view the historical data of the particular stock, and allows comparison of the stock to major indices. In addition, Bing Finance also features a JavaScript-based Stock screener, allowing investors to quickly filter for value, contrarian, high-yield, and bargain investment strategies.

Bing Health refines health searches using related medical concepts to get relevant health information and to allow users to navigate complex medical topics with inline article results from experts. This feature is based on the Medstory acquisition.

Bing Images enables the user to quickly search and display most relevant photos and images of interest. The advance filters allow refining search results in terms of properties such as image size, aspect ratio, color or black and white, photo or illustration, and facial features recognition.

Local

Bing Local searches local business listings with business details and reviews, allowing users to make more informed decisions.

Bing Maps enables the user to search for businesses, addresses, landmarks and street names worldwide, and can select from a road-map style view, a satellite view or a hybrid of the two. Also available are "bird's-eye" images for many cities worldwide, and 3D maps which include virtual 3D navigation and to-scale terrain and 3D buildings. For business users it will be available as "Bing Maps For Enterprise".

Bing Reference semantically indexes Wikipedia content and displays them in an enhanced view within Bing.[citation needed] It also allow users to input search queries that resembles full questions and highlights the answer within search results. This feature is based on the Powerset acquisition.

Social

Bing Social allow users to search for and retrieve real-time information from Twitter and Facebook services. Bing Social search also provides "best match" and "social captions" functionalities that prioritises results based on relevance and contexts. Only public feeds from the past 7 days will be displayed in Bing Social search results.

Bing Shopping lets users search from a wide range of online suppliers and marketer's merchandise for all types of products and goods. This service also integrates with Bing cashback offering money back for certain purchases made through the site. This feature is based on the Jellyfish.com acquisition, but will be discontinued July 30, 2010.

Bing Travel searches for airfare and hotel reservations online and predicts the best time to purchase them. This feature is based on the Farecast acquisition.

University

Bing University allow users to search for and view detailed information about United States universities, including information such as admissions, cost, financial aid, student body, and graduation rate.

Bing Videos enables the user to quickly search and view videos online from various websites. The Smart Preview feature allows the user to instantly watch a short preview of an original video. Bing Videos also allow users to access editorial video contents from MSN Video.

Bing Weather allow users to search for the local weather for cities around the world, displaying the current weather information and also extended weather forecasts for the next 10 days. Weather information are provided by Intellicast and Foreca.

Bing xRank allowed users to search for celebrities, musicians, politicians and bloggers, read short biographies and news about them, and track their trends or popularity rankings. As of October 2010, this feature was shut down.

Webmaster services

Bing allows webmasters to manage the web crawling status of their own websites through Bing Webmaster Center. Additionally, users may also submit contents to Bing via the following methods:

Bing Local Listing Center allow businesses to add business listings onto Bing Maps and Bing Local

Mobile services

Bing Mobile allow users to conduct search queries on their mobile devices, either via the mobile browser or a downloadable mobile application. In the United States, Microsoft also operates a toll-free number for directory assistance called Bing 411.[35]

Other services

BingTweets is a service that combines Twitter trends with Bing search results, enabling users to see real-time information about the hottest topics on Twitter. The BingTweets service was initiated on July 14, 2009 in a partnership between Microsoft, Twitter and Federated Media.[39]

Bing Rewards is a service that allows users to earn points for searching with Bing. These points can be redeemed for various products and services.

Software

Toolbars

Both Windows Live Toolbar and MSN Toolbar will be powered by Bing and aim to offer users a way to access Bing search results. Together with the launch of Bing, MSN Toolbar 4.0 will be released with inclusion of new Bing-related features such as Bing cashback offer alerts.[35] (See "Bing Rewards")

Prior to October 30, 2007, the gadgets were known as Live Search gadget and Live Search Maps gadget; both gadgets were removed from Windows Live Gallery due to possible security concerns.[42] The Live Search Maps gadget was made available for download again on January 24, 2008 with the security concern addressed.[43] However around the introduction of Bing in June 2009 both gadgets have been removed again for download from Windows Live Gallery.

Accelerators

Accelerators allow users to access Bing features directly from selected text in a webpage. Accelerators provided by the Bing team include:

Bing Translator

Bing Maps

Bing Shopping

Web Slices

Web Slices can be used to monitor information gathered by Bing. Web Slices provided by the Bing team include:

Weather from Bing

Finance from Bing

Traffic from Bing

Add-ons

The Bing team provides an official Bing Firefox add-on, which adds search suggestions to the Firefox search box from Bing.[44]

Marketing and advertisements

Live Search

Since 2006, Microsoft had conducted a number of tie-ins and promotions for promoting Microsoft's search offerings. These include:

Amazon's A9 search service and the experimental Ms. Dewey interactive search site syndicated all search results from Microsoft's then search engine, Live Search. This tie-in started on May 1, 2006.

Search and Give - a promotional website launched on 17 January 2007 where all searches done from a special portal site would lead to a donation to the UNHCR's organization for refugee children, ninemillion.org. Reuters AlertNet reported in 2007 that the amount to be donated would be $0.01 per search, with a minimum of $100,000 and a maximum of $250,000 (equivalent to 25 million searches).[45] According to the website the service was decommissioned on June 1, 2009, having donated over $500,000 to charity and schools.[46]

Club Bing - a promotional website where users can win prizes by playing word games that generate search queries on Microsoft's then search service Live Search. This website began in April 2007 as Live Search Club.

Big Snap Search - a promotional website similar to Live Search Club. This website began in February 2008, but was discontinued shortly after.[47]

Live Search SearchPerks! - a promotional website which allowed users to redeem tickets for prizes while using Microsoft's search engine. This website began on October 1, 2008 and was decommissioned on April 15, 2009.

Debut

Bing's debut featured an $80 to $100 million online, TV, print, and radio advertising campaign in the US. The advertisements do not mention other search engine competitors, such as Google and Yahoo!, directly by name; rather, they attempt to convince users to switch to Bing by focusing on Bing's search features and functionality.[48] The ads claim that Bing does a better job countering "search overload".[49]

Bing Rewards

Launched by Microsoft in September 2010, Bing Rewards provides credits to users through regular Bing searches and special promotions.[50] These credits are then redeemed for various products including electronics, gift cards, sweepstakes, and charitable donations.[51] Initially, participants in the program were required to download and use the Bing Bar for Internet Explorer in order to earn credits; however, this is no longer the case, and the service now works with all desktop browsers.[52] The Bing Rewards program is similar to two earlier services, SearchPerks! and Bing Cashback, which have now been discontinued.

The Colbert Report

During the episode of The Colbert Report that aired on June 8, 2010, Stephen Colbert stated that Microsoft would donate $2,500 to help clean up the Gulf oil spill each time he mentioned the word "Bing" on air. Colbert mostly mentioned Bing in out-of-context situations, such as Bing Crosby and Bing cherries. By the end of the show, Colbert had said the word 40 times, for a total donation of $100,000. Colbert poked fun at their rivalry with Google, stating "Bing is a great website for doing Internet searches. I know that, because I Googled it."[53][54]

Los Links Son Malos

An advertising campaign during 2010, Los Links Son Malos (English: The Links are Bad), took the form of a Mexican telenovela, with people conversing in Spanish, subtitled in English. In it, somebody rides in on a horse and takes a woman away when he shows her how easy Bing is to use in order to get movie tickets or travel.

Search deals

As of Opera 10.6, Bing has been incorporated into the Opera browser, but Google is still the default search engine. Bing will also be incorporated into all future versions of Opera.[55]Mozilla Firefox has made a deal with Microsoft to jointly release "Firefox with Bing", an edition of Firefox where Bing has replaced Google as the default search engine.[56][57] However, the default edition of Firefox still has Google as its default search engine, but has included Bing in its default list of search providers since Firefox version 4.0.[58]

In addition, Microsoft also paid Verizon Wireless $550 million USD[59] to use Bing as the default search provider on Verizon's BlackBerry, and in turn, have Verizon "turn off" (via BlackBerry service books) the other search providers available. Users could still access other search engines via the mobile browser.[60]

Bing It On

In 2012, a Bing marketing campaign asked the public which search engine they believed was better when its results were presented without branding, similar to the Pepsi Challenge in the 1970s.[61][62] This poll was nicknamed "Bing It On".[63][64] Microsoft presented a study of almost 1,000 people[65] which showed that 57% of participants in such a test preferred Bing's results, with only 30% preferring Google.[66]

TV to Bing About

In September 2011, Bing partnered with The CW Network. Promotional messages for Bing were inserted in commercials featuring cast and crew members from programs of the network. Their slogan "TV to Talk About" was changed to "TV to Bing About". Lisa Gurry, a director-marketing explained they made this move to attract a younger audience.[67]

Name origin

Through focus groups, Microsoft decided that the name Bing was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that it would function well as a URL around the world. The word would remind people of the sound made during "the moment of discovery and decision making."[68] Microsoft was assisted by branding consultancy Interbrand in their search for the best name for the new search engine.[69] The name also has strong similarity to the word 'bingo', which is used to mean that something sought has been found or realized, as is interjected when winning the game Bingo. Microsoft advertising strategist David Webster originally proposed the name "Bang" for the same reasons the name Bing was ultimately chosen (easy to spell, one syllable, and easy to remember). He noted, "It's there, it's an exclamation point [...] It's the opposite of a question mark." This name was ultimately not chosen because it could not be properly used as a verb in the context of an internet search; Webster commented "Oh, 'I banged it' is very different than 'I binged it'".[70]

According to the Guardian "[Microsoft] hasn't confirmed that it stands recursively for Bing Is Not Google, but that's the sort of joke software engineers enjoy."[71] Qi Lu, president of Microsoft Online Services, also announced that Bing's official Chinese name is bì yìng (simplified Chinese: 必应; traditional Chinese: 必應), which literally means "very certain to respond" or "very certain to answer" in Chinese.[72]

"Decision engine"

Bing has been heavily advertised as a "decision engine",[74] though thought by columnist David Berkowitz to be more closely related to a web portal.[75]

Legal challenges

On July 31, 2009, The Laptop Company, Inc. stated in a press release that it is challenging Bing's trademark application, alleging that Bing may cause confusion in the marketplace as Bing and their product BongoBing both do online product search.[76] Software company TeraByte Unlimited, which has a product called BootIt Next Generation (abbreviated to BING), also contended the trademark application on similar grounds, as did a Missouri-based design company called Bing! Information Design.[77]

Microsoft contends that claims challenging its trademark are without merit because these companies filed for U.S. federal trademark applications only after Microsoft filed for the Bing trademark in March 2009.[78]

Adult content

Video content

Bing's video search tool has a preview mode that could potentially be used to preview pornographic videos.[79] By simply turning off safe search, users can search for and view pornographic videos by hovering the cursor over a thumbnail, since the video and audio, in some cases, are cached on Microsoft's server.[citation needed]

Since the videos are playing within Bing instead of the site where they are hosted, the videos are not necessarily blocked by parental control filters. Monitoring programs designed to tell parents what sites their children have visited are likely to simply report "Bing.com" instead of the site that actually hosts the video. The same situation can be said about corporate filters, many of which have been fooled by this feature.[80] Users do not need to leave Bing's site to view these videos.[81][82]

On June 12, 2009, Microsoft announced two changes regarding Bing's Smart Motion Preview and SafeSearch features. All potentially explicit content will be coming from a separate single domain, explicit.bing.net. Additionally, Bing will also return source URL information in the query string for image and video contents. Both changes allow both home users and corporate users to filter content by domain regardless of what the SafeSearch settings might be.[84]

Regional censorship

Bing censors results for adult search terms for some of the regions including India, People's Republic of China, Germany and Arab countries.[85] This censoring is done based on the local laws of those countries.[86] However, Bing allows users to simply change their country/region preference to somewhere without restrictions – such as the United States, United Kingdom or Republic of Ireland – to sidestep this censorship.

Criticism

Censorship

Microsoft has been criticized for censoring Bing search results to queries made in simplified Chinese characters, used in mainland China. This is done to comply with the censorship requirements of the government in China.[87] Microsoft has not indicated a willingness to stop censoring search results in simplified Chinese characters in the wake of Google's decision to do so.[88] All simplified Chinese searches in Bing are censored regardless of the user's country.[89]

Performance issues

Bing has been criticized for being slower to index websites than Google. It has also been criticized for not indexing some websites at all.[90][91]

Copying Google's results

Bing has been criticized by competitor Google, for utilizing user input via Internet Explorer, the Bing Toolbar, or Suggested Sites, to add results to Bing. After discovering in October 2010 that Bing appeared to be imitating Google's auto-correct results for a misspelling, despite not actually fixing the spelling of the term, Google set up a honeypot, configuring the Google search engine to return specific unrelated results for 100 nonsensical queries such as hiybbprqag.[92] Over the next couple of weeks, Google engineers entered the search term into Google, while using Microsoft Internet Explorer, with the Bing Toolbar installed and the optional Suggested Sites enabled. In 9 out of the 100 queries, Bing later started returning the same results as Google, despite the only apparent connection between the result and search term being that Google's results connected the two.[93][94]

Microsoft's response to this issue, coming from a company's spokesperson, was: "We do not copy Google's results." Bing's Vice President, Harry Shum, later reiterated that the search result data Google claimed that Bing copied had in fact come from Bing's very own users. Shum further wrote that "we use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt into sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users." [95] Microsoft commented that clickstream data from customers who had opted in was collected, but said that it was just a small piece of over 1000 signals used in their ranking algorithm, and that their intention was to learn from their collective customers. They stated that Bing was not intended to be a duplicate of any existing search engines.[96]